The increased use of technology and computers has generated a corresponding increase in digital data. This ever-increasing digital data requires a corresponding ever-increasing amount of storage space.
The need for storage space for digital data is fueled through many changes in society. For example, home computer users increased storage of multimedia data, especially video and photographic data, has served to increase the amount of storage space needed. Likewise, in industry, storage area networks (SANs) also require increased storage space. As more and more business is being conducted electronically, there is an ever-increasing demand and need for the storage of this vast amount of business data. Furthermore, there is a demand to digitize the storage of once paper files in an attempt to decrease the overhead cost of this paper generation and storage.
In industry, SANs enable users to manage, expand, and maintain large amounts of storage. Examples of types of data stored on SANs include medical imaging data, MICROSOFT SHAREPOINT data, file-sharing data, video data, audio data, email data, disaster recovery data, and data for databases such as Structured Query Language (SQL), ORACLE, MYSQL and other databases.